Continuing this week’s GDC-2015 fueled blitz of graphics API news releases, we have Khronos, the industry consortium behind OpenGL, OpenCL, and other cross-platform compute and graphics APIs. Back in August of 2014 Khronos unveiled their own foray into low-level graphics APIs, announcing the Next Generation OpenGL Initiative (glNext). Designed around similar goals as Mantle, DirectX 12, and Metal, glNext would bring a low-level graphics API to the Khronos ecosystem, and in the process making it the first low-level cross-platform API. 2014’s unveiling was a call for participation, and now at GDC Khronos is announcing additional details on the API.
First and foremost glNext has a name: Vulkan. In creating the API Khronos has made a clean break from OpenGL – something that game industry developers...